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The Man With the Goods
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20541 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1992 |
3,718 Words |
| Author
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Mark Schaffer
Mark Schaffer, who lives in Washington, D.C., writes
frequently on fiction and popular culture. He is the coeditor
of the forthcoming More Office Humor and is currently working
on a book about the Warner Brothers television studios of the
fifties. |
The inner city. Everybody knows where that is. That's the part of town you speed through, hoping you don't break down. It's the trash-strewn streets and steel-covered shop fronts you see on television, usually through the windshield of a patrol car. It's the comfortably disturbing dinner-hour news feature--the knot of people milling around some obscure intersection gesturing to the camera about the nice kid in the ambulance who "never made any trouble, always was kind to the ladies."
The Los Angeles riots put the inner city on the political front burner last spring. For those who live in any large American metropolis, the inner city is like the ancient maritime maps that labeled unknown, forbidding regions "Here be Dragons." And dragons there are--vicious twelve year olds who will kill you for your watch, fourteen-year-old hookers ready to give you the death virus, and the all-encompassing miasma of drugs in any and all shapes and types against a background of gutted ruins. Best steer clear of the inner city, unless you've got business there. And if you do go, you'd best know the rules. Richard Price does.
In Clockers, Price returns to the mean streets he depicted so vividly in the stories and novels he wrote during the 1970s. An ambitious novel stuffed with memorable characters, off-the-street dialogue, and a truckload of urban grit, Clockers is the other side of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. Where Wolfe's keen eye trashed a glittering yuppie paradise built on paper profit, Price takes us into the foreboding regions, the fetid, defeated halls of the projects, to reveal a stunningly complete world built on powder and the gallery of players who meet daily in sad, mortal combat to vie for the soul of a city.
Coming Home To The Projects
For Price, the bleak projects life depicted in Clockers is a homecoming of sorts. Now an in-demand Hollywood screenwriter--The Color of Money (1986) and Sea of Love (1989)--Price knows this turf in his bones. Born in 1949, he grew up in a lower-middle-class Bronx housing development that would serve as fertile soil for the future writer. His father was a window dresser, and his mother, now a bank teller, was a housewife.
A difficult birth left Price mildly disabled by cerebral palsy on his right side, and, as he told on interviewer, he grew up thinking, "You don't just overcome, you overcome with drama…. I could only get so far with a bum arm and limpy leg, so I began looking for something to
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